[masnao]

> cash: eaten by inflation.

americans haven't had real inflation since the military backed greenback. it will be very interesting to see how much that outdated system can hold after being stretched so much by the feds (fed and federal govt).

[glofish]

not true at all. The inflation has been gigantic, when expressed in as the price of owning a home or getting educated.

the traditional measures of inflation expressed in the price of other goods are not capturing the real story. Those good are much cheaper today and mask the actual decrease in purchasing power.

[christophilus]

Agreed: home, college, basic surgery... Some of our costs are through the roof. Others have been kept low due to technology, hyper optimization, or leveraging slave wages in a developing country.

[ravenstine]

I can't find it at the moment, but I remember a graph that showed the price of goods over a period of something like 30 years. Things like clothes, food, gadgets, cars, etc., we're shown to have decreased in price. Things we actually need like education, medical care, and housing had risen astronomically. So even if the dollar itself doesn't inflate much, it still can have significantly less buying power, as you say. What's worse is the cheapness and ubiquity of gadgets serves to mask the problem by making everyone think they have more wealth than they really do.

[sudosysgen]

Indeed. Pegging inflation to the cost of labour-intensive goods is a thinly veiled lie.

[masnao]

even if you account the unofficial inflation, name one single country that had similar (or even close) to the US ratio of printed money to total economy, since the the 1970s. after 2008 was just the cherry on top.